Polar Bear at Risk of Extinction - GW

  
Perfectly at home in one of the world's most forbidding environments, polar bears spend their summers roaming the Arctic on large chunks of floating ice. They drift for hundreds of miles, finding mates, hunting for seals and fattening themselves up for the winter. Without these thick rafts of sea ice, the world's largest bear could not survive. Yet at this moment, the polar bear's Arctic habitat is literally melting away beneath it due to global warming.

Over the past three decades, more than a million square miles of sea ice -- an area the size of Norway, Denmark and Sweden combined -- has disappeared. Scientists predict that, if the current rate of global warming continues, most, if not all, of the bears' summer sea ice will be gone by 2100. As a result, the world's polar bears could face global extinction by the end of this century.

In May 2006, the threat of global warming to polar bears prompted the IUCN-World Conservation Union, one of the world's leading environmental bodies, to add the bears to its "Red List" of threatened wildlife. Classified as "vulnerable," which is defined by the IUCN as a species facing a "high risk of extinction in the wild," the worldwide population of roughly 20,000 polar bears could decline more than 30 percent over the next 45 years.

Already, the ice on the southern edge of the polar bear's range is melting about three weeks earlier than in the past. The loss of those critical weeks leaves the bears less time to hunt, eat and store up fat. As a result of early melting, there has been a 14 percent decline in the western Hudson Bay polar bear population over the past ten years -- a decline clearly caused by global warming.

In addition, a growing number of polar bears may be drowning as they are forced to swim more often, and for longer distances, in search of ice sheets. According to a report by the U.S. Minerals Management Service, researchers observed four dead polar bears floating 60 miles off Alaska in September 2004 and said it was likely that many other bears swimming far offshore also drowned.

Under pressure from an NRDC lawsuit, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to consider protecting the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act –- and announced it will make a preliminary decision in December 2006. If the agency proposes federal protection, NRDC will rapidly mobilize millions of Americans during the public comment period on behalf of a final decision that protects the polar bear. But if these crucial safeguards are denied, we will immediately challenge the agency's decision in federal court.

To help protect the polar bear, please revisit this page in early January, when the newly elected Congress takes office, and send a message urging your senators and representative to save the polar bear's Arctic habitat. In the meantime, you can support our ongoing campaign of public pressure to save these majestic bears by making a gift to NRDC's BioGems Initiative.

http://www.savebiogems.org/polar/

A September 2005 report revealed that the polar ice cap has shrunk by more than 20 percent since 1979, losing an area the size of Colorado in the preceding year alone.